NASA TO SEND 300,000 NAMES ON STARDUST SPACECRAFT.

Byline: Lee Siegel Salt Lake Tribune

If you missed the opportunity to send your name to Mars or Saturn, here's another chance to get your moniker in space: The Stardust spacecraft will carry 300,000 names on a microchip when it is launched in 1999, collects dust from a comet in 2004 and lands in Utah two years later.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced last week that it is inviting people to submit their names by Nov. 30 so they can be etched on the fingernail-size silicon chip. The names are being gathered by The Planetary Society, a nonprofit group that promotes space travel.

Why would anyone want to send their name to a comet?

``For fun,'' Planetary Society spokeswoman Susan Lendroth said by phone from Pasadena. ``Many people have longed to travel into space. Stardust gives them a chance to send their name - if nothing else - on that journey, with a return ticket to Earth.''

Gloria Jew, a Stardust official at JPL, said: ``This is a chance for people to take a vicarious trip to a comet and back again.''

The first 100,000 names on Stardust will be those of Planetary Society members. The next 200,000 names submitted also will ride on Stardust. People won't receive confirmation their names will ride the spacecraft, ``but if names are sent in the immediate future, there is no problem,'' Lendroth said.

Names may be submitted electronically to The Planetary Society's Internet page at http://planetary.org or by linking to that page through JPL's World Wide Web page, http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov. Neatly printed submissions also can be mailed to The Planetary Society, 65 N. Catalina Ave., Pasadena, CA 91106-2301 or faxed to [phone]. Submissions should include your name, address and age, with one name on a postcard or sheet of paper.

Stardust will be launched from Kennedy Space Center, Fla., in February 1999, loop twice around the sun and approach within 100 miles of the nucleus of Comet Wild-2 (pronounced vilt-two) in 2004. Stardust will carry a lightweight silica gel called aerogel that will trap interstellar and comet dust.

``In January 2006, an atmospheric re-entry capsule housing the comet sample will plunge through the skies over Utah and parachute softly to Earth's surface'' at the Utah Test and Training Range in the Great Salt Lake Desert, according to NASA officials. The microchip will be mounted on the capsule.

In a key design test in February 1998, a model of Stardust's re-entry capsule will drop from a hot-air balloon and then parachute to the ground in the Utah desert.

The $199 million Stardust mission will be the first to gather interstellar and comet dust and bring it back to Earth. But Stardust will not be the first JPL spacecraft to carry names into space. The names of 100,000 Planetary Society members were carried on a microchip when the Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars last summer. And a CD-ROM with 600,000 signatures was aboard the Cassini spacecraft when it recently blasted off for Saturn, Lendroth said.